US is working with Israel to find ‘gaps’ in ‘complete breakdown’ of intelligence that led to Hamas’s surprise attack that slaughtered 1,200, US House Intelligence chair says

Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the US is now helping Israel identify its blind spots in intelligence gathering and how it missed Hamas' attack as the war with the terrorist group continues.

The Ohio Republican, 63, said the U.S.'working closely with Israeli intelligence services to see the gaps they have, after reports suggested Israel was aware of a potential threat from Hamas before October 7.

He spoke after an Israeli soldier told CBS News that Israel “didn't take anything seriously” when it was warned about Hamas's potential in recent months.

On October 7, more than 1,200 innocent Israelis were slaughtered – caused by a “complete breakdown” in communications between Israel and its intelligence agents, Turner suggested.

Turner told “Face the Nation”: “I think what you saw was just a general rejection by Israel and the Israeli intelligence community of the possibility of this level of threat, which is really leading to the complete collapse that has occurred here.

“This could of course have been an institutional bias that led to its rejection, but the other aspect that made this so dangerous is that even as October 7 began to unfold, their forces did not respond.

“They didn't have the deployment capability to respond, not just the intelligence capability to prevent it

“It's one thing to be able to try to identify a specific individual and provide information about their location and activities, and to actually be able to direct an operation.

'[CIA Director William] Burns has made it very clear that we're not just providing direct access to our intelligence, and that certainly gives us the opportunity to be cautious.”

Burns recently returned from the Middle East and, according to Turner, was trying to “make sure that our intelligence apparatus is working closely with Israel to try to fill some of the gaps that they clearly have.”

It followed reports that Israeli officials had an understanding of Hamas's brutal Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it took place, but dismissed the battle plan as too ambitious for the group to achieve, a bombshell report claims .

In a 40-page document obtained by The New York Times, Hamas laid out a detailed plan to carry out its attack on Israel, which ultimately led to the deaths of about 1,200 people in one day.

The blueprint reportedly did not include a date for the attack, but offered an exhaustive look at the terrorist group's strategy, which included attacking fortifications around the Gaza Strip while storming key military bases and division headquarters.

According to the newspaper, the plans in the document were followed with chilling precision by Hamas in last month's attacks, raising questions about why Israel failed to take steps to prevent this.

It is also claimed that officials admitted that they could have stopped or at least mitigated the October 7 attacks if they had taken some urgent warnings from analysts seriously.

For more than a year, Israeli officials reportedly understood that Hamas was planning to launch an assault across the border with a barrage of rockets in a surprise attack.

The use of drones to disable security cameras and automated machine guns along the border were also part of Hamas's long-standing plan.

In a sign of the shocking precision that Hamas followed in its master plan, the document ordered armed men to fly paragliders into Israel, using the unorthodox strategy to wreak grisly consequences at the ill-fated Supernova music festival, where at least 364 people were killed .

Israeli intelligence officials have come under scrutiny in the weeks after the October 7 attacks, amid questions about a lack of understanding of the impending attack before it happened.

But Hamas appeared to have a much better grip on the Israeli apparatus than previously known, as the document contained extensive, sensitive details about the location and size of Israeli forces and communications centers.

This has also raised questions about how Hamas was able to obtain this information, and about the possibility of leaks within Israeli intelligence.

Despite the chilling details in the document, which was widely circulated within Israeli military and intelligence circles, experts reportedly determined that the attack was far too ambitious for Hamas to pull off.

It is not known whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has seen the document.

Named 'Jericho Wall' after the border on the modern-day West Bank cited in biblical texts, sixty points within the wall would be targeted by Hamas fighters for their siege of Israel.

'Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will surely prevail,” the document began with a quote from the Quran. The same quote has been repeated by Hamas terrorists in chilling footage of the October 7 attacks and in the weeks since.

Despite widespread knowledge of the document, it was largely rejected, including by the Israeli army's Gaza Division, the wing charged with defending the Gaza border, where much of the ongoing conflict has been focused .

The division's experts found that Hamas's objectives and intentions were unclear, with a separate military review of the document concluding: “It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested.”

Three months before the October 7 attacks, German diplomat Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff demonstrated how “anything is possible in Gaza” as he paraglided into the region to warn of its vulnerability.

At the same time, a senior analyst from Unit 8200, the agency's intelligence division, reportedly warned that Hamas had conducted days of training exercises that chillingly mimicked the document's battle plans.

“I strongly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst warned, comparing the exercise to the “content of Jericho Wall.”

“It's a plan designed to start war… it's not just an attack on a village.”

On Sunday, Israel carried out more than 400 attacks in Gaza after Hamas broke the fragile week-long truce.

The Israeli army said it had carried out hundreds of bombings since the ceasefire collapsed on Friday, while Hamas announced “rocket fire” against several Israeli towns and cities, including Tel Aviv.

The Israeli military said fighter jets carried out extensive attacks on the southern town of Khan Younis, where Hamas leaders are believed to be based.